Hawking atheopathy

Famous physicist goes beyond the evidence

Published: 28 September 2010(GMT+10)

Stephen Hawking has again hit the headlines with a new book, The Grand Design,
which supposedly explains the universe without God. Readers wanting to skip the
detailed article can read the summary.

A brief history of Hawking

Stephen Hawking (b. 1942) is one of the best-known scientists in the world today.
Yet his achievements are not so widely known. His greatest contribution was probably
a combination of quantum mechanics and relativity: in 1974 he mathematically showed
that black holes, a verified prediction of general relativity, will slowly lose
mass through a quantum mechanical effect that would result in emission of radiation.
It’s notable that the much vaunted
peer-review process initially rejected this eponymous Hawking Radiation.1 In 1979, he was awarded
the prestigious Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, England,
which he held for 30 years. This chair was once held by the
great creationist scientist, Sir Isaac Newton.

Hawking’s fame largely rests on his popular-level book A Brief History of
Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988). This was a huge best-seller,
but has also been called “the most widely unread book in the history of literature”.
Another major contributor is how he has overcome his severe disability caused by
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), commonly called Lou Gehrig’s Disease,
that has left him dependent on a wheelchair and speech synthesizer.

This book was more famous for its philosophy than for its science, with his famous
rhetorical question, ‘What place, then, for a creator?’2 and the conclusion:

If we find the answer to that [i.e. why it is that we and the universe exist], it
would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind
of God.

Yet in his book, he had to admit:

This [big bang] picture of the universe … is in agreement with all the observational
evidence that we have today. … Nevertheless, it leaves a number of important
questions unanswered … (the origin of the stars and galaxies).3

Later, Hawking belatedly realized that a ‘theory of everything’ is a
fantasy that founders on Gödel’s incompleteness proof: that
in any theoretical system as complex as arithmetic or above, there would always
be true statements that cannot be proven within the system.4

Hawking belatedly realized that a ‘theory of everything’ is a fantasy
that founders on Gödel’s incompleteness proof: that in any theoretical
system as complex as arithmetic or above, there would always be true statements
that cannot be proven within the system.

Earlier this year,
Hawking warned against contact with aliens, as the consequences would be
devastating: “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus
landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.”
Yet he insisted that we should
colonize space or perish: “Our only chance of long-term survival is
not to remain inward looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.”

Atheistic faith masquerading as science

As usual with atheistic scientists, Hawking’s atheopathy long predated his
science. His influential mother Isabel was a Communist, and in his teen years he
admired the strongly anti-Christian mathematical philosopher Bertrand Russell.

As with Dawkins, his arguments for atheism are puerile, e.g.

We are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in
the outer suburb of one of a hundred billion galaxies. So it is difficult to believe
in a God that would care about us or even notice our existence.

Yet King David was equally aware of our tininess compared with the universe’s
vastness, and came to a different conclusion in Psalm 8:3–5:

3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and
the stars, which you have set in place,

4 what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you
care for him?

5 Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned
him with glory and honor.

Similarly, as C.S. Lewis pointed out, the
medieval theologians were well aware that compared to the vastness of heavens, the
earth was but a point in space. But somehow modern antitheists think this is news,
regard it as a profound disproof of God, as if God needed a small universe to exist.
And if the universe were small, then these same atheopaths would probably whine,
“If God is so great, then why didn’t He create anything else?”6

Marriage

He met his future wife Jane (née Wilde) in 1962, a year before he was diagnosed
with his degenerative illness. Jane is a scholar in her own right, with a doctorate
in Medieval Portuguese Literature. She is also a Christian, and unwisely violated
Paul’s command against unequally yoking with an unbeliever (2 Cor. 6:14)—they married in 1965. Jane did not expect
him to live very long; he had been given two years—the time the eponymous
Lou Gehrig (1903–1941) survived his diagnosis. But somehow, this engagement
made a huge difference in his life, as he admitted, “what really made a difference
was that I got engaged to a woman named Jane Wilde. This gave me something to live
for.” His biographers said:

‘Self-creation’ is self-contradictory. Something can do something—including
create—only if it exists; something not yet existing has no power to do anything,
including create itself.

“There is little doubt that Jane Wilde’s appearance on the scene was
a major turning-point in Stephen Hawking’s life. The two of them began to
see a lot more of one another and a strong relationship developed. It was finding
Jane that enabled him to break out of his depression and regenerate some belief
in his life and work. For Hawking, his engagement to Jane was probably the most
important thing that ever happened to him. It changed his life, gave him something
to live for and made him determined to live. Without the help that Jane gave him,
he would almost certainly not have been able to carry on or had the will to do so.”7

Their marriage soon produced three children. Yet although Stephen lived far longer
than anyone expected, his body deteriorated markedly. Jane said in 1986, “Without
my faith in God, I wouldn’t have been able to live in this situation.”
Unfortunately, Stephen’s antitheism became more dogmatic and vicious, which
caused major conflicts. Yet she stuck with him, following 1 Corinthians 7:12–17. But eventually Stephen ended
the marriage after 25 years. Jane later wrote an insightful autobiography, revealing
the conflicts between her Christian faith and Stephen’s dogmatic atheism.8

New atheistic book

Hawking has again made the headlines with his new book, co-authored with science
writer and physicist Dr Leonard Mlodinow, strangely called The Grand Design.9 This supposedly proves that
no Creator was necessary. Yet once again, he goes way beyond the evidence. And there
are people who have not been impressed with the book who we would expect to welcome
it. The ultra-liberal
and anti-Christian New York Times published a
review:

The real news about The Grand Design, however, isn’t Mr. Hawking’s
supposed jettisoning of God, information that will surprise no one who has followed
his work closely. The real news about The Grand Design is how disappointingly
tinny and inelegant it is. The spare and earnest voice that Mr. Hawking employed
with such appeal in A Brief History of Time has been replaced here by one
that is alternately condescending, as if he were Mr. Rogers explaining rain clouds
to toddlers, and impenetrable.

The Grand Design is packed with grating yuks. “If you think it is
hard to get humans to follow traffic laws,” we read, “imagine convincing
an asteroid to move along an ellipse.” (Oh, my.)10

And The Times (UK) published a review:

The present book consists of only 208 large-print pages, yet I thought it too long
— it reads like a stretched magazine article. Even allowing for the need for
the pleasures of digression, there is too much padding and too much recycling of
long-stale material. It gives me no pleasure at all to say that I doubt whether
The Grand Design would have been published if Hawking’s name were
not on the cover.35

Extrasolar planets

For example, he cites the discovery of extrasolar planets11 as a turning point against Isaac Newton’s
belief that the universe must have been planned:

That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions—the single Sun, the
lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass—far less remarkable,
and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to
please us human beings.

Hawking fails logic and meta-science

Hawking’s key assertion is that the big bang followed inevitably from the
laws of physics so needed no creator:

because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself
from nothing.

However, logic doesn’t
seem to be his strong point; ‘self-creation’ is self-contradictory.
Something can do something—including create—only if it exists; something
not yet existing has no power to do anything, including create itself.

And for such a great scientist, he seems rather clueless about the meta-science
issues, i.e. the assumptions that overlie science and allow it to work.
For example, his comment presupposes that laws can do anything, but
I've pointed out before that this type of claim:

… treats natural laws as real entities. In reality, scientific laws are descriptive
of what we observe happening regularly, just as the outline of a map describes the
shape of a coastline. Treating scientific laws as prescriptive, i.e. the cause of
the observed regularities, is like claiming that the drawing of the map is the cause
of the shape of the coastline.20

Similarly, Prof. John Lennox, who defeated Dawkins in a debate (see
DVD), in his
review of Hawking, pointed out:

But contrary to what Hawking claims, physical laws can never provide a complete
explanation of the universe. Laws themselves do not create anything, they are merely
a description of what happens under certain conditions.

The very reason science flourished so vigorously in the 16th and 17th centuries
was precisely because of the belief that the laws of nature which were then being
discovered and defined reflected the influence of a divine law-giver.—Prof.
John Lennox

What Hawking appears to have done is to confuse law with agency. His call on us
to choose between God and physics is a bit like someone demanding that we choose
between aeronautical engineer Sir Frank Whittle21
and the laws of physics to explain the jet engine.

That is a confusion of category. The laws of physics can explain how the jet engine
works, but someone had to build the thing, put in the fuel and start it up. The
jet could not have been created without the laws of physics on their own—but
the task of development and creation needed the genius of Whittle as its agent.

Similarly, the laws of physics could never have actually built the universe. Some
agency must have been involved.

To use a simple analogy, Isaac Newton’s laws of motion in themselves never
sent a snooker ball racing across the green baize. That can only be done by people
using a snooker cue and the actions of their own arms.22

Hawking also plays the usual “warfare of religion v science” for all
its worth. Thus his hero has long been Galileo, despite the fact that his dispute
was really science v. science (see for example The
Galileo quadricentennial23).

Hawking also credits the Ionian Greeks with discovering the nature of scientific
laws. But he ignores the extensive research that shows that science itself thrived
only under the Christian worldview, and was stillborn in other cultures, including
ancient Greece. Thus it thrived in the European middle ages under a general
Christian worldview, and even more so with the explicit biblical worldview of the
Reformation (see The biblical roots of modern
science24). This
was due to the presuppositions required for science to work in the first place,
including the reality and rationality of both the universe and our own thoughts.25

Lennox, a mathematician who is also very learned in the philosophy of science, raises
the same points:

The very reason science flourished so vigorously in the 16th and 17th
centuries was precisely because of the belief that the laws of nature which were
then being discovered and defined reflected the influence of a divine law-giver.

One of the fundamental themes of Christianity is that the universe was built according
to a rational, intelligent design. Far from being at odds with science, the Christian
faith actually makes perfect scientific sense.

Some years ago, the scientist Joseph Needham made an epic study of technological
development in China. He wanted to find out why China, for all its early gifts of
innovation, had fallen so far behind Europe in the advancement of science.

He reluctantly came to the conclusion that European science had been spurred on
by the widespread belief in a rational creative force, known as God, which made
all scientific laws comprehensible.

Multiverses

Hawking’s whole edifice rests on “M-theory”. Yet they first admit
“people are still trying to decipher the nature of M-theory, but that may
not be possible.” The book claims, “M-theory is not a theory in the
usual sense. It is a whole family of different theories.” This predicts that
“ours is not the only universe.” Rather, “Instead M-theory predicts
that a great many universes were created out of nothing.” And here is their
punch line: “ … their creation does not require the intervention of
some supernatural being or god. Rather, these multiple
universes arise naturally from physical law. They are a prediction of science.”
But given that these can’t be observed, even in principle, this is unscientific.

But they argue that it would explain why some will inevitably have the characteristics
for life, and if ours wasn’t one of them, then we wouldn’t be here to
observe it. This is a variant of the so-called ‘anthropic principle’
(from Greek anthrōpos άνθρωπος
= man). This sounds profound but it’s actually no explanation at all. As Christian
philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig pointed out:

If you were dragged before a trained firing squad, and they fired and missed:

it is true that you should not be surprised to observe that you are not dead, but
it is equally true that you should be surprised to observe that you are
alive.

If you were asked, ‘How did you survive?’, it would be inadequate to
answer, ‘If I didn’t, I would not be here to answer you.’26>

Multiverses supposedly explain the existence of ours with special characteristics.
But this is really special pleading, i.e. an explanation these atheists accept for
the universe but would not tolerate for a second to explain anything else. Consider
if we found a pattern of markings on a beach which spelled your name. Naturally
you would conclude that an intelligent agent had written it. This is more plausible
than thinking that wind and wave erosion somehow produced that pattern by chance,
even though there is an extremely tiny probability of this happening.

But under multiverse reasoning, there are an infinite number of parallel universes
containing every possible quantum state, ‘In infinite space, even the most
unlikely events must take place somewhere.’27

So if a person had an a priori bias that no one could have written your
name, he could argue that we just happen to be in one of the tiny fraction of universes
where this improbable erosion pattern arose naturally. If this sounds totally unreasonable,
then by the same logic, so is the atheistic preference for an infinite number of
universes over a Creator.28

It’s notable that his ideas have been criticised by none other than his greatest
collaborator on black holes, Sir Roger Penrose.29
Penrose reviewed his old friend’s book,30
and commented on “Hawking’s strange-sounding philosophical standpoint
of theory-dependent realism put forward here.” I.e. Hawking has proven
nothing; rather, his whole edifice depends on a very shaky theory of physics, which
Penrose explains is “ … ‘M-theory’, a popular (but fundamentally
incomplete) development of string theory. … M-theory enjoys no observational
support whatever.”

String theory itself, let alone M-theory that stems from it, is
most dubious. An editorial in New Scientist lamented about how
the fancy mathematics of string theory really prove nothing in reality:

But these equations tell us nothing about where space and time came from
and describe nothing we would recognize.31

Hawking’s collaborators disagree

As above, Penrose is most critical of Hawking’s current book. He also criticised
Hawking’s previous best seller—in the film version of A Brief History
of Time, he said (although he claims no religious beliefs):

There is a certain sense in which I would say the universe has a purpose. It’s
not there just somehow by chance. Some people take the view that the universe is
simply there and it runs along—it’s a bit as though it just sort of
computes, and we happen by accident to find ourselves in this thing. I don’t
think that’s a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe, I
think that there is something much deeper about it, about its existence, which we
have very little inkling of at the moment.

Another of Hawking’s major collaborators is George Ellis.33 Yet he is not an atheist but a Quaker and Platonist,
and winner of the Templeton
Prize. Ellis is much more aware than Hawking of how cosmogonic models are
heavily dependent on philosophical assumptions. In an interview in Scientific
American, Ellis was quoted as follows:

“People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain
the observations,” Ellis argues. “For instance, I can construct you
a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove
it based on observations.” Ellis has published a paper on this. “You
can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing
wrong in that. What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using
philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide
that.”34

Last year, Prof. Ellis gave an interesting private lecture at a university in South
Africa, which was attended by creationist engineering student
E. van Niekerk, who reports:

He (carefully) disagrees with this atheistic fluff that Hawking and his fellow colleagues
generate. He for instance told us why the multiverse idea does not solve the problem
of design, or why this universe is here. He also slipped something else. There either
has to be an eternal being/God, or an eternal universe, and he does not seem convinced
that this universe can be eternal (even with fluctuations of existence etc.). Although
he is not a biblical creationist, he said there is one piece in the Bible that was
very “reasonable”. That is the opening words of the Gospel of John,
namely: In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was
God.

He has courageously fought against a terrible physical disability. His Christian
wife Jane was a great support, but eventually he left her after 25 years of marriage.

His fame largely rests on his weak attempts to exclude God based on tendentious
physics. His atheism was present early, and was an assumption he brought to his
physics; it was not derived from his science. It was also a source of growing conflict
in his marriage, that stretched it to breaking point.

Hawking’s latest work contains flaws in logic and the philosophy of science.
E.g. “self-creation” is logically contradictory, and the laws of science
cause nothing to occur but describe what does occur.

He proposes a theory of multiverses, but this is not scientific since they can’t
be observed.

His M-theory isn’t supported by a shred of experimental evidence.

Thus a summary of Hawking’s approach is:

The universe looks designed, but a designer is not allowed.

So there must be some other explanation.

Let’s resort to some other religious ideas to explain the appearance of design
(the multiverse).

Then let’s use even more religious ideas to support our religious idea.

Related Media

References

Christian philosopher William Lane Craig showed up the shortcomings
of Hawking’s logic in ‘What place, then, for a creator?’: Hawking
on God and Creation, British J. Philosophy of Science 41:473–91,
1990. Return to text.

Spencer, W., The Origin and History of the Solar System,
in: Walsh, R.E., ed., Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Creationism,
pp. 513–523, Creation Science Fellowship, Inc., Pittsburgh, PA, 1994.
Return to text.

This involves a complex theory where the dust disk as well
as the other existing planets change the positions of Uranus and Neptune. See Spencer,
W.,
Migrating planets and migrating theories, J. Creation 21(3):12–14,
2007, as well as the Creation magazine articles online at creation.com/uranus
and creation.com/neptune. Return to text.

Barrow and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
(Clarendon, 1986), use this objection to evade the implications of a Designer. However,
Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig points out the fallacy in
‘Barrow and Tipler on the Anthropic Principle vs. Divine Design’, Brit.
J. Phil. Sci.38:389–95, 1988 (see also online
version). Once this fallacy is removed, the book becomes a compendium
of data of modern science which point to design in nature inexplicable in natural
terms and therefore pointing to a Divine Designer. However, some of the alleged
design features presuppose a big bang, so are not considered here.
Return to text.

Tegmark, M., Parallel universes: Not just a staple
of science fiction, other universes are a direct implication of cosmological observations,
Scientific American 288:30–41, May 2003. Of course,
there is no actual observation of these other universes, just observation of fine-tuning
in ours that is explained away by multiverses. Return to text.

They worked together on what are now called the Penrose–Hawking
singularity theorems, and co-authored The Nature of Space and Time, Princeton University
Press, 1996. Penrose is now Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the
University of Oxford , and the brother of Jonathan Penrose, who won the British
Chess Championship 10 times. Return to text.

Penrose, R., review of The Grand Design, Financial Times
(UK), 4 September 2010. Return to text.

Ideas needed—The hunt for a theory of everything is
going nowhere fast, New Scientist 188(2529):5, 10 December
2005 (emphasis added). Return to text.

They co-authored The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time,
Cambridge University Press, 1973. George Francis Rayner Ellis is now Emeritus Distinguished
Professor of Complex Systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics
at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Return to text.

Farmelo, G., Review of The Grand Design, The
Times, 11 September 2010. Return to text.

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Readers’ comments

Linzay R.,South Africa

Thanks Jonathan for the excellent article which continues to demonstrate that there continues to be a lot of faith statements in Science (especially in Cosmology and Astrophysics). It is sad to see that even in gifted minds like that of Hawking, there are none as blind as those who do not want to see!

Richard C.,Canada

The material on this site is for those serious about being able to give an answer for their faith with a serious desire to communicate that to others so they will not be deceived.

Chris T.,New Zealand

How terribly sad that such a brilliant mind has been led so far from the Truth. Why not send Prof. Hawking a few Journals of Creation?

Jonathan Sarfati responds

Indeed it is very sad. But your idea is a good one. People may be able to find his contact details on the web.

Anthony M.,USA

I enjoyed this article very much. It was factual, to the point, and critical of Hawkings position without being rude, which is more often than not the case when those who do not have all the information try to defend their Faith.

While it may seem an underhanded blow, I think Hawkings is experiencing a “sour grapes” episode, which stems from his unfortunate condition. It is easy to see the product of his worldview, as he sees the glass half empty rather than half full. The fact that he still exists is tribute to the power of God, and his marriage to a Christian woman for twenty-five years tells me there is more to this than meets the eye.

With that said, while I have to agree to disagree on his position, I pray that God delivers a healing in full view of the entire world, that Dr Hawking might leave his wheelchair. I would like to be the first to get his comment then. Be well.

Bob Enyart,USA

If you enjoy the strength of argument in this Sarfati article on Hawking, you’ll love his Greatest Hoax book on Dawkins. Hawking claims that in the Big Bang the laws of physics produced the universe, but BB cosmology claims that those laws did not exist prior to the Big Bang. And Hawking says that the matter of the universe came from energy borrowed from the gravitational energy of the universe, to which we can ask, “What universe?” And not only does Hawking say that people should avoid talking to aliens (really), but that to escape global warming, mankind should go to the Moon or Mars. So mankind should flee from the slightest temperature fluctuation on Earth to planets with temperatures about 200 degrees F above and below zero, and say good-bye to liquid water and oxygen. I’m so glad that CMI sees through so many widely-accepted contradictions!

Why do you find it sad that someone does not share the same beliefs as you? It is not sad that stephen hawking puts his intelligence to work on physics. It would, however, be sad if he instead put all his faith into a religion and did not contribute to the understanding of the universe. And sending him your religious materials to him is wrong. He rejects it. He does not send his scientific materials to your church, now does he?

Jonathan Sarfati responds

What do you expect? “I believe something is true and makes a vast difference to your eternal destiny, but I'm happy for you to believe differently as disastrous as I think this is.” Compare: you believe that you can fly unaided, so are heading towards a high cliff. “I'm happy that you believe you can fly. After all, what’s true for you is true for you, but not for me.”

As explained, Hawking’s problem is that he goes way beyond the physical evidence which is his specialty.